Liberals Said It Couldnt Be Done - Road to the Middle Class

REMEMBER THE Carter malaise? Remember 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment? Remember crime in New York City? How long ago it all seems. Even the crack epidemic has subsided.

And the liberals said there was nothing we could do about it. America had become ungovernable.

In a remarkable piece in the London Times that could never have appeared in The New York Times Andrew Sullivan reminds the Brits just how much things have turned around in America in the last 25 years since the nadir of inflation, unemployment, and gas lines in 1979-80.

He is writing all this not to sneer at the Brits but to cheer them up. He is telling them not to worry about lager louts, rampant crime, lone parents, and bombers from Leeds, but to realize that things don�t have to stay in the toilet. America went through a phase like that and then things started to get better.

But the liberals said it couldn�t be done.

Liberals have not just said it couldn�t be done. They have done more. They have said, and they continue to say, that it never happened. And that is the striking take-away from Sullivan�s article. When you read about how everything has gotten better all across the fruited plain, from the economy to crime to drugs to divorce, you think to yourself: �Why do I never seem to read about this in the MSM? Why do I get to read nothing but sulphurous rage against George W. Bush? Why do we still hear Democratic politicians claiming that the 1980s were a lost decade of greed and homelessness?�

Sullivan is right, of course, to credit all the improvement to

civil society � that hard-to-define Burkean m�lange of families, friends, small organisations, volunteers, churches and PTAs.

But it is important to remember why Burke was rambling on about the �little platoons� back in 1790 at the height of the French Revolution. He was proposing the virtue of bottom-up civil society against the top-down oppression of know-it-all elites. He was proposing that one of the most important jobs of an elite was to stop meddling and let people get on with their lives.

That is what the conservative movement has been all about. It wants to set the overall parameters and let ordinary people get on with it. Because then, in the words of the American philosopher Rush Limbaugh, ordinary people will do extraordinary things.

The French people still, two hundred years later, remain unable to escape from under the yoke of an overweening, meddling elite.

The liberals said it couldn�t be done.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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